The ethics of animal testing.

[apophenia]

If the criteria for choosing animals suitable for testing is based around sentience and the ability to feel pain or suffering, could animals be replaced with people in a permanent vegetative state, people who are brain dead but kept "alive" to be test subjects, or cloned humans genetically modified to never be conscious?

The permanent vegetative state subjects are possibilities, but I imagine they'd be far too rare to cover a significant portion of experimental needs.

Turns out people in a vegetative state can actually sense stimuli; they just can't respond to it:

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/11/1 ... ive-state/

Not all people in a vegetative case...some. And, since we do have this testing equipment, it makes Pappa's question even more relevant...why not extend this testing to humans in a vegetative state?

I'm jumping in the middle, so forgive me if I neglect context. The problem is one of irreversible error. If we presume a human subject not aware and experiment on them, and they turn out to be, there is no way to reverse the error. In medicine, they experimented with anesthetizing people with curare. After some time they realized that while the curare paralyzed the patient so they didn't cry out, the nerve sensations were unimpaired and patients were operated on while essentially fully conscious. And we have plenty of examples of people in supposedly irreversible comas awakening. There is the case of an individual who, through some defect, only had half a brain, but was otherwise within the normal range for intellectual capacities and such. Determining candiates on the basis of gross anatomy and other features would be quite error prone.

[Warren Dew]

Not all people in a vegetative case...some. And, since we do have this testing equipment, it makes Pappa's question even more relevant...why not extend this testing to humans in a vegetative state?

Possibly all people in a vegetative state are aware, and we've only just now learned about how to detect it in some cases.

The idea that anything we can't detect doesn't exist is the idea that's problematic here.